21, the Home of Trump’s Favorite Burger, Renovates Without Proper Permits

After a flood, the clubhouse of Giuliani and Co. reopens.

On an evening in the week after the 2016 election, the N.Y.P.D. blocked off Fifty-second Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and Donald Trump pulled up outside the 21 Club with members of his family. The restaurant is a longtime favorite of Trump’s; it has a dress code, and it foregrounds its celebrity associations, like a monument overshadowed by its own gift shop, or a midtown Mar-a-Lago. In 1984, Trump made a half-hearted attempt to buy the restaurant; two years earlier, Roy Cohn, his lawyer, threw Roger Stone a thirtieth-birthday party there. Visiting as President-elect, Trump received a standing ovation. He ate a thirty-six-dollar burger and made a promise to fellow-diners, saying, “We’ll get your taxes down. Don’t worry about it.” (In the same restaurant a few weeks later, Michael Flynn, having accepted a job as Trump’s national-security adviser, is reported to have met representatives of the Turkish government who offered him millions of dollars to kidnap or render Fethullah Gülen, the Turkish cleric who lives in Pennsylvania.)

At the start of this year, the 21 Club closed for renovations, said to be needed after flooding caused by a burst pipe. A Times reporter, on a tour of the work in late January, noted that crews had “ripped out walls, ceilings and flooring.” A few weeks ago, the restaurant announced that its first-floor space was ready to reopen, but, in the days leading up to its first service, someone walking along Fifty-second Street might have noticed, beneath a balcony lined with iron lawn jockeys, a crumpled piece of paper pasted to an outer wall. This, a notice of a stop-work order, had been issued by the Department of Buildings; an inspector had seen exposed floor and ceiling joists on the second floor, as well as exposed electrical wiring and, in one room, the absence of fire-safety protections. The inspector had not been allowed to visit other floors. The restaurant’s management, as if hoping to align itself with White House theories of legal immunity, had been renovating without a D.O.B. permit.

Still, at lunchtime on May 8th, the 21 Club greeted its first guests since January. (On the same day, news broke, via the lawyer of the porn star alleged to have had an affair with the President, that a shell company controlled by Michael Cohen, the President’s attorney, had been paid millions of dollars by American companies, including one linked to a Russian oligarch.) “Welcome back,” staff members said, again and again. The dining room was half full, and calm. Two women of retirement age hugged their server, saying, “Oh, my God!,” in apparent relief at the end of exile. A British family was celebrating a daughter’s twenty-first birthday; a waiter told them he was looking for the 66 Club, to celebrate his. Later, he explained to another table that work was continuing in the cellar, and upstairs, where there are private dining rooms, including the one where, during the Obama Administration, Rudy Giuliani told his table, “I do not believe that the President loves America.” The bathrooms smelled of paint. The stop-work order was still in place, but the notice was no longer posted outside.

One afternoon a few days later, Theodore Suric, the restaurant’s general manager, was at a table beside a bay window, wearing a suit and sneakers. Asked about the complications of reopening a restaurant subject to a stop-work order, he said, “January 2nd, we had a big flooding, it’s an old building. . . . Once we started peeling down, there were some things to remedy. That’s really it. It was really general repair, what we were doing. But it’s such a big restaurant—twenty-six thousand square feet, four floors—that it took a little while.” (The restaurant is owned by Belmond, a London-based hotel company.)

Asked why the restaurant had not sought a permit, Suric said, “Because one wasn’t necessary. It was general repair.” This, he said, was why the stop-work order had been rescinded.

According to the D.O.B.’s Web site, the order had been only part-rescinded, to allow for remedial fire-safety work; it was otherwise in place.

Suric disagreed. When pressed, he said, “I’m not sure, to be honest with you, I don’t know.” (A D.O.B. spokesman later confirmed that the stop-work order still applied; he also explained that it’s illegal to remove a posted order.)

Suric said that it was disappointing not to be given a chance to talk about the restaurant’s history, and left the table.

Frank Sinatra was singing, “Come fly with me.” At the bar, a man in a tweed jacket sat motionless, staring straight ahead. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the June 25, 2018, issue, with the headline “Power Lunch.”